State and local lotteries have become important fund raising events for the sponsoring agency. The popularity of lotteries has soared in the 1980's and continues to grow.
Those agencies charged with the administration of lotteries are acutely aware of the need to maintain the integrity of the lottery system from the printing of lottery tickets to the validation of prize winning number. Accordingly, much effort has been made to ensure that all tickets are authentic. It is generally recognized that in order for a lottery game to be successful, from the point of view of both the purchaser and the sponsor, the lottery ticket must be secure against counterfeiting, forgery and/or alteration.
Scratch-off type lottery tickets are those having at least one area over printed with an opaque latex ink. When the latex ink dries it forms a protective coating that can be scratched off to reveal pre-printed game data indicating whether or not a prize has been won.
One method of authenticating a lottery ticket is to print a bar code on the bottom side thereof. When a person claims a prize by rubbing the scratch-off layer to reveal the winning of a prize, the retail store owner can authenticate the ticket by reading the exposed bar code on the bottom side of the ticket with a scanner or other suitable device.
Bar codes currently used on lottery tickets suffer from two major disadvantages. First, the bar codes are generally one dimensional and are comprised of at least 10 and sometimes as many as 43 or more characters to be printed on the lottery ticket. The number of characters occupies a great deal of space on scratch-off lottery tickets which are typically only 4" long and 2" wide. It is because the typical bar code takes up a large amount of space on the lottery ticket, that the bar code has been printed only on the bottom side or non-game data side of the lottery ticket.
In the early 1990's there was developed a new type of bar coding system incorporating a two-dimensional bar code. The first of these systems is known as a stacked bar code in which several lines of a bar code are stacked one on top of the other. This type of bar code can be read by a laser bar-code scanner, a camera or a scanner such as those used in validation terminals. There has also been developed a two-dimensional matrix bar code comprised of dots and spaces in a two-dimensional matrix. Two dimensional bar codes enable a greater number of symbols to be set forth in a smaller area.
It would be a significant advance in the art of protecting printed documents including lottery tickets from counterfeiting if a bar code system could be employed for authenticating the printed document. A significant advantage would be obtained if the entire bar code could be hidden from view until such time as authentication is necessary. Such a system would make it more difficult to counterfeit the printed document and when the printed document was a lottery ticket provide a more secure lottery system.
It would also be a significant advantage to the overall appearance of the lottery ticket if the area occupied by the bar code authentication system could be reduced so that more of the substrate area of the printed document could be used for other purposes, such as artwork in conjunction with lottery tickets.